A Component Content Management System (CCMS) is transformational for organizations with large-scale content creation and maintenance needs. But before we discuss why you need it, let’s explain what it is.
Balancing Content Needs with Creative Constraints
Organizational learning is evolving. Instructor-led training, blended learning, e-learning were sufficient for a long time, but that’s not true anymore. As content demands are growing, you need more types of content, and that content needs to be available in different places and formats.
The solution, of course, is to create large volumes of content. It isn’t something you can purchase, because 70% of the content is proprietary. It’s unique to you. It’s your secret sauce.
Your content sells your product, explains how to use your internal systems, and defines the values that you want your employees to follow. Now, you have to create and maintain a lot more of that content than you ever did before.
You also have to tailor content to different audiences. Sometimes you have to tailor it by role, by region, or by product. And now you have different versions of the content that you’re expected to create and maintain. Frankly, your team can’t possibly keep up.
Finally, updates become overwhelming. Just to make one change, you have to find all of the places where that content is used, update them all, and redistribute them to all the different places. A lot of teams out there are struggling to keep up with this chaos.
The Content Explosion
At Xyleme, we talk a lot about the “content explosion.”
As your organization grows, content demands invariably increase, and your team will need to create, deliver and maintain more and more content to help your employees, your customers, and your learners succeed.
One common example is documenting processes. You sit down with a Subject Matter Expert (SME) and you document an exact process that your team needs to be able to perform. You get it just right, it gets approved by an expert, and then it goes through an editorial process.
But once you’ve got it just right, that procedure needs to go into actual materials. And those materials can look like a lot of things. It might be documentation, training, presentations, or e-learning.
Typically, getting this content into different outputs requires copying and pasting the content from one application to another. If it starts in Word, for example, you copy and paste it into a rapid e-learning authoring tool. You need a presentation for your instructor-led training, so you copy and paste it into PowerPoint.
That’s somewhat time consuming, but doable. Unfortunately, now you have multiple copies of the same content floating around your organization.
The Single-Platform Content Solution
Xyleme is a single platform that lets you author, publish, deliver, and analyze your content all in one place.
With Xyleme, every piece of content is in one repository. You don’t have to go find different source files — it’s all in one place. It’s easy to find and update, and more importantly, there’s no chaos.
From there, you can publish into many different formats, including:
- Digital assets
- Webpages
- e-learning activities
- On-site job aids
- Instructor guides
- Student guides
- Presenter slides
- Reference guides
- And more
Then you can distribute that content to lots of different places.
We all know that getting people to come to one place, like a Learning Management System (LMS) doesn’t work.
People expect to get the content they need at the point of need, exactly when they need it. But with Xyleme, it doesn’t matter where you put the content. You can put it anywhere you want because it’s linked back to a single source. If you change that content in one place, it updates everywhere.
Finally, organizations and creators want feedback. Who’s using the content? What pages are they looking at? Where are people struggling with the content? Xyleme’s Learning Record Store (LRS) tracks analytics like time spent on the page, how long time it took someone to finish a course, and full assessment results.
If you have exams stored in Xyleme’s platform, for example, you can see detailed analytics, right down to the question level. With all of your content in one place, you can control it and manage it more effectively throughout your organization.
Component Content Management System Metrics
One of the big benefits that we see when people implement Xyleme is that you can look at metrics for all of the content you’re creating.
How much of it is out there? Who's creating it? What templates are you using? You can gain a much deeper understanding of how content is performing.
For example, before one customer updated a course, they looked at the distribution analytics to see how the course was performing. With Xyleme’s analytic dashboards, they could see what questions people were getting right and which ones they were getting wrong, and where they were spending the most time. And when too many people were getting a particular question wrong, they were able to re-work the information to help them understand the materials and pass the test.
With all of the content in one place, you can look at everything from production to consumption to make better choices about content creation and development.
Aligned Teams & Optimized Resources
It’s hard to overstate the power of having all of your content in one searchable place.
A system like Xyleme aligns organizational needs with creator needs. As an organization, you can eliminate duplicate or outdated copies of content, and your creators don’t have to waste time looking for or recreating something that may already exist.
With Xyleme, not only can you make your content creators more efficient, the content itself will also be more consistent.
Updates in Minutes, Not Weeks
Recently, we worked with a customer that had a training content linked in a separate system. They had links to references within this system throughout their materials.
At one point, the URL to this system changed, which meant that every single link throughout their materials had to be changed. This was a major problem for this customer. We were able to help them by running a global search-and-replace that went through all their materials, updated the URL, and instantaneously fixed all of the links in the system.
Unfortunately, they still had to go and update all the materials that were outside of Xyleme. Weeks after we were able to run the global search-and-replace, they were still updating the content that was outside of Xyleme.
That’s the power of having all of your content in a single database. You have tools like global search-and-replace at your fingertips to update your content universally.
Defusing the Content Explosion
Another common issue for creators is content overlap. Content like policies and procedures, goals and objectives, key indicators, and growth drivers don’t change often.
But when they do change, it’s a big problem. You have to find every instance where that content appears and update it. And if you’re feeling the pain of the “content explosion,” you might just throw up your hands and not do it.
With Xyleme, however, that headache is gone. If a table, or an image, or a paragraph, or even a whole topic needs to be changed, you can change it in one place and seamlessly publish it everywhere. And that’s what makes it so transformative.
With Xyleme, however, that headache is gone. If a table, or an image, or a paragraph, or even a whole topic needs to be changed, you can change it in one place and seamlessly publish it everywhere. And that’s what makes it so transformative.
As a content creator or manager, you can also react faster when you get feedback. You can iterate and update things quickly. You make a change, and that change propagates to every place it was used. You publish it out to all the endpoints, and everything stays in sync.
A Component Content Management System is the only way to efficiently manage content at scale.
